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Ammunition hoopla! (Gonzo)

Do you think that you can hurl this through the air with the help of a certain death machine?

Good to meet you once more, Mr. Death
Merchant. I trust that your business is operating smoothly—no shortage of
feuding kings and lords to stifle your business? No? Good. Then it seems like
you are on your way! Lucky you!

What’s that? You want to lecture me on an
aspect of your business? Well, okay, but I should warn you, as an assistant to
the grim reaper himself I am a busy man and not one who embraces your economics
of death, being a communistic equal-opportunity offender (“Death is for
Everyone!” did not, unfortunately, catch on as a progressive-liberal slogan).
Okay, lecture away…

“You look like a classy guy, Mr.
Death-assistant, so I’ll get straight to the punch! Did you know that if you
are selling death-machines, it pays to also sells large pieces of throwing
matter? Yup, I found this out the hard way.” (Of course he found out the hard-way,
his con-man attitude practically makes him reek of failure) “In fact, with more
and more sieges popping up every day, I found that every chip and chap wanted
some of my special rocks—so I started selling ‘em cheap!

What kind of stones, you say?” (In fact,
reader, remember, that I had already told him to sell stones. I have no idea
why he is lecturing me on this crap) “Well, that depended on the weapon. On
average, my most popular seller is stones weighing 100-200 pounds; these
trebuchet balls are quite deadly and have been known to fracture, killing
several people at once!” (I guess this time an inferior product worked out in
the customer’s favor…) “Sometimes, though, when a customer wants to really beat
up a castle’s defenses, they will order my Big Boy package and hurl stones
weighing 300-400 pounds! But that is nothing compared to my Marauder Package,
where I once sold a massive boulder weighing 600 pounds! I call these ‘Holy
Land Balls’ and they sure do punch some fright into the heathens! …whatever
those are, but, at any rate, these humans evidently truly care about their
heavy rocks; in fact, after selling some of these earthen missiles to one nasty
king on crusade, he actually took the effort to transport them hundreds of
miles away to the battle site—geez, talk about a serious rock collector, eh?”
(Reader, if I was someone who could die, I would wish this fate upon myself
now—I. Can’t. Stand. This. Asshole. Talking!) But hey, sometimes you want
quantity over quality, in which case, then I discovered that selling many, many
smaller stones was just as profitable since, evidently, in Lisbon not too long
ago, there were these engines which could fire 5000 stones, one every 15
seconds! Needless to say I really made a profit that day…”

Well, reader, that is the Merchant of Death
talking about his rocks and stones. He went on like this for several hours,
eventually babbling on about non-medieval related projectiles, so we do not
need to hear that babble. Just be glad that you did not hear it; be glad, for I
nearly went insane listening to his dreck. Be glad reader, be very, very glad.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a
mission for my boss—the Grim Reaper—involving chemical weapons. We’ll pick up
on this later.

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Lately, I was browsing around online and found another handy resource for aspiring medievalists.

Enter, Western Michigan University's Medieval Institute!

The site has links to an extensive book shop, scholarly journals, as well as a free download. See below for links.

General listing: http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medievalpress/
Index of titles available for purchase: http://www.wmich.edu/medievalpublications/all-titles
The 'Medieval Globe' book(s): http://scholarworks.wmich.edu/medieval_globe/ (Click on title(s) for free download)

Okay, that is all for now. Sometime soon I think that I would like to organize all of my resource links so that I, as well as you, have a concrete listing of reliable resources. Until then, we shall have to make due.